This led to an invitation for Peter and his colleagues to give about two-hundred seventy-five speeches on the McKinsey “Eight Basics of Putting Excellence into Management.

From 50 employees on up, the senior leaders must develop additional leaders throughout the organization who share the same values, passion, and knowledge of the business.

Doing this requires one simple routine: a well-structured, one-day monthly management meeting that includes everyone who supervises or manages anyone in the business. It should be a day focused on learning, sharing, and problem-solving vs. a day of mind-numbing reports.

We encourage management teams to set aside an hour or more each month to brainstorm ways to improve each of these cash cycle components. This is a powerful exercise to do with the broader middle-management team at a half- to full-day monthly management meeting. It will give everyone a better understanding of how cash flows through the business and how each function can contribute positively.

A piece for Harvard Business Review, “Meeting Overload Is a Fixable Problem,” provided a “playbook” for “meeting resets” that we helped develop and test.